Tony Visconti: ‘Yesterday was almost the worst day of my life.’
Photograph: Nathan Denette/AP

“You’re supposed to have a good time tonight,” declared Woody Woodmansey, the last surviving Spider from Mars, addressing the crowd before his David Bowie tribute band, Holy Holy, were to take the stage. “That’s not a request – it’s a fucking order. Have a fucking good time, OK?”

Holy Holy, with longtime Bowie producer Tony Visconti on bass, had booked the date long ago, as part of their tour playing the 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World– on which both had featured. On 8 January, Visconti had led a New York audience in singing Happy Birthday to Bowie over the phone. Now, his band was presiding over a wake. A book of condolences sat in the lobby at a makeshift shrine adorned by flowers. With its dark stoner-rock feel, archly delivered vocals, and lyrics about insanity, serial killing, and having one’s “dormant will” sucked away, The Man Who Sold the World isn’t exactly the stuff of eulogies, but all of a sudden, the occasion was freighted with an entirely different meaning. The show had quickly sold out after the announcement of Bowie’s death, another date added for the following night. A TV crew filmed the queue outside, and there was an air of expectant solemnity in the unfeasibly packed old vaudeville 850-seater theatre.

Visconti told the crowd: “Yesterday was almost the worst day of my life. We had to talk about whether we were going to perform more on this tour, but there’s no better way to work through grief except through music.” The assembled fans, many wearing Aladdin Sane lighting-bolts across their faces or Ziggy Stardust astral spheres on their foreheads, others dressed as Bowie-inspired dandies in defiance of the cold outside, raised a cheer; they roared when the full eight-piece band emerged and the opening riff to Width of a Circle swirled out.

It was jarring at first to see the shaven-headed Glenn Gregory, of Heaven 17, onstage in a sparkly suit-jacket taking Bowie’s place with his old colleagues. While his voice was strong and true, he looked stiff, deploying rock star-by-numbers poses; beside him, Visconti, with a lightning bolt strap on his bass, seemed pale and drawn. But Woodmansey pummeled his kit with the intensity of a man who wasn’t going to let a fire go out, summoning Bowie’s death-defyingly intense singing on his last album, the Visconti-produced Blackstar. By the time the band rolled through the evil-sounding sludge of side two’s She Shook Me Cold, with Woodmansey and gun-for-hire Paul Cuddeford’s cathartically wild drum-and-guitar feature, the band had loosened up. Gregory grew in confidence, and Visconti even cracked the odd smile.

“Technically, we’re not a tribute band; we are the real dudes,” Visconti said when they’d run through the album. “And you know I’m going to choke on this, but we couldn’t have done it without David Bowie.” He kissed his hands and lifted them to the sky, and the crowd screamed as if they were hoping the Star Man, whatever plane or planet he was on, could somehow hear them.

From here, Holy Holy played early-70s Bowie hits, and the crowd loosened up too: there was dancing, spontaneous hugging between people who’d just met, snogging, singing along to songs with wide but suddenly comfortable ranges (“Is there life on Maaars?”), tears and most of all, beaming smiles. For all of Bowie’s studied, arty aura, he could exude an easy warmth onstage, especially in the later years before a heart attack put an abrupt end to his touring. And where he had effectively sacked Woodmansey and the Spiders without warning onstage in London in 1973, by announcing he was killing off Ziggy Stardust, he approved Holy Holy and had his website announce their gigs. Those close to him saw him as generous: Visconti has posted on his Facebook page: “He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift.”

The abruptness of Bowie’s constant changes could make him seem like the ultimate control freak, but while he was known to guard his legacy carefully, there’s a sense that at every turn, he was letting something go, stepping back before it could get stale so fans and followers could interpret it themselves, and make it their own. And so it was with Holy Holy, who sounded better the more liberties they took.

After the last boisterous chords of Suffragette City rang out, Woodmansey again addressed the crowd: “We can tell by your faces, you’re having a good time. We did. And that’s exactly what Bowie would have wanted.” It was a strange, mad celebration – but a celebration nonetheless.